Rising Sun
by The Exile
Summary: A new ultra-secure prison is being built on an almost unreachable island. The Agency have other, more dangerous plans for it. An origin story for some of the characters in Dark Savior, including Kurtliegen, Doc, DeBose and Lance.
1. Chapter 1

"KLAUS!" screamed the girl in the white dress and the straw summer hat indignantly, "KLAUS KURTLIEGEN!"

"Yes, my darling one and only true love?"

Klaus was tall and wiry, like all of his family, with thick dark brown hair and an angular face. He wore a black tunic and trousers, the school uniform of the prestigious St. Kevorkian's High, with a rose in a buttonhole. He had been voted 'Most Likely To Be A Vampire' by the school council, as well as 'Most Fun To Blackmail'.

"Did you send me these flowers?" she pointed to the bouquet in her hand.

"What's the matter? Don't you like them?"

"These are BLUE ROSES! LAVIAN BLUE ROSES!" she shrieked like a siren, "How dare you taint my abode with the symbols of our enemies! Those filthy barbarians! We should have annihilated them all when they lost the war!"

Before he could open his mouth, she had grabbed him by his tie and was choking him to death.

"And furthermore, I would rather marry a Lavian than one of your pathetic deadbeat family! I know you're only proposing to me because you want to leech off my family! Well, the Bedeveres will not be tainted by your weak bloodline!"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that."

Klaus looked around, trying to ignore the fact that his face was slowly turning blue and his hands felt tingly, to the young woman behind him. She was quite the beauty as well, he thought.

"His baby brother is quite cute."

"What, Kirk?" Klaus looked puzzled. Puzzled and oxygen-starved, "He's ten years old!"

"He's got such a baby face!" insisted the other girl, "And he's so much more innocent and endearing!"

"Because he's ten years old!"

"Hmph, you have no taste." said the Lady Francesca Bedevere, letting go of Klaus so she could fold her arms, "If you're going to go for one of them, at least go for Karl or Kristof. Karl's darkly handsome and Kristof has money sense. Or if you like older men..."

"Hey, Klaus, where is Kirk? We usually see him after school." asked the other woman.

"My brother... isn't here." said Klaus. His eyes went dark. Roughly grabbing his tie free of the Lady's grip, he turned on his heel and almost ran down the corridor.

"Come back! Come back! You're ruining the game!" yelled the woman, running down the corridor after him.

* * *

Kirk looked around him. He was in some kind of hospital ward. The walls were white and everything was clean and sterile. The bed he lay on was spartan but functional, with a crisp white sheet. Next to the bed was a small desk with a lamp on it. He looked down and saw that he was dressed in a plain white tunic.

He didn't remember coming here. He didn't remember falling asleep. All he remembered was his father leading him somewhere after school. That was right... the grand room with a stage they used to organise performances to entertain guests. His father loved the Theatre. They couldn't afford to hire private performances now, but they still went to see the plays at the ordinary Theatre on the mainland. How had he gotten here? He scratched his head. Maybe he was ill or something... he didn't feel ill. He sat on the side of the bed and kicked his feet.

A knock on the door startled him.

"Come in." he ordered. The door swung open silently and an older boy walked in. He looked dangerous, like the guards – not big, but small, lithe and muscular. He wore some kind of strange grey, orange and blue uniform with shoulder pads and a helmet. Kirk couldn't see his face.

"I'm sorry if my appearance scared you." said the boy softly, removing the helmet. He looked about as old as Kirk's middle brother, Karl, but his hair was a lighter shade of brown and more messy, "This is just my uniform. I won't hurt you."

"Your feet aren't touching the ground." Kirk pointed out.

"Yes, that's an antigravitic field. Its still in its experimental stage."

"What?"

"Never mind. You probably don't get taught this stuff at school. The name's Schumizer. Corey D. Schumizer. And you're Kirk, right?"

"Kirk Kurtliegen the Third." said Kirk Kurtliegen the Third proudly.

"Well, Kirk Kurtliegen the Third, we'll be seeing a lot more of each other from now on, as I'm responsible for you, so we should remember each other's names. Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?"

"Where am I? I want to see my parents." demanded Kirk.

"You really don't, you know." said Mr. Schumizer, tossing his head to one side, "You want to know why?"

"What are you talking about now?"

"'Cause your parents sold you to us." he explained.

"What... did... you... say?" Kirk's eyes blazed in a fury that rivalled furnaces from the depths of hell. At ten years old, Kirk could already terrify most children his own age when he truly became angry. It came pretty naturally to him, but he had to admit he had learned a lot of it from his dad, "I will NOT have anyone dishonouring the Kurtliegen family name! Do I make myself clear? Take back what you just said about my parents!"

"Look, I got the receipts and everything." with a magician-esque flick of his wrist, he produced a wad of papers, "Fifty thousand bucks. With a promise that the others cost a million each. You folks must be in some serious debt."

"HOW DARE YOU!" Kirk snatched the documents off him, "These are a forgery! You kidnapped me! You'll be executed for this crime!"

"Nah, you just get life for kidnapping. Now, forging the Agency seal, THAT's a capital offense. You need to know these things. You ever tried to forge the Agency seal, kid? Its impossible anyhow."

Kirk dropped the papers on the floor.

"You're...?"

"'Fraid so, kid. Welcome to the Agency."

* * *

"Tracy? Who's Tracy?"

"T.R.A.C.Y.," the scientist replied, in the manner of a teacher spelling out a word to a particularly backward and irritating child who really ought to know how to spell words like that at his age, "It stands for 'Total Reality Annexe: Code Yellow.' Its my latest project..."

The bounty hunter yawned and stretched his arms, "Aww, I was hoping she'd be cute."

"The only girls you're likely to find in this laboratory, Seagal, will be inside containment fields and probably incurably homicidal."

"C'mon, you must have at least named the project after a girl! Its pretty obvious you named it on purpose, with a lame acronym like that."

"You volunteered to help with the project. Now, are you genuinely interested or are you just here to waste my time?"

"If the pay's good and I don't get experimented on."

"No, you are simply needed as a security escort for the crew sending some scientific apparatus..." the scientist pointed to the enormous cylindrical device in the middle of the laboratory that dominated most of the room and reached from the floor to the ceiling and was staffed by eight assistants who monitored its displays and tweaked the settings on its control panels, trying not to trip over the mass of wires connected to it, occasionally pouring something into it that made it hiss and steam, "By sea, to the old Lavian embassy."

"What cargo?" asked Seagal, who had learned the hard way to always be suspicious of everything and anything Agency scientists did or said, "Does it explode?"

"Provided you leave it alone, it won't do anything at all of interest to you."

"Ain't that where they're building the new ultra-secure prison?"

"Precisely."

"And they're gonna put all the really dangerous prisoners there? Like Blade and the Lansky twins?"

"Indeed." said the scientist, "But the prison is not built yet, and so there will be no prisoners. You will be there to protect against attempts at theft and piracy. This is very expensive and valuable equipment."

"Oh... pirates. I can handle pirates."

"Good, good. I will tell the Agency that you have accepted the commission."

He watched the bounty hunter walk out.


	2. Chapter 2

"Um... boss? Shouldn't you have told him the whole truth?" one of the other scientists spoke up.

"I couldn't, without telling him what he doesn't have the security clearance to know. Besides, why does he need to know?"

"Because this is potentially his most dangerous assignment?" volunteered the assistant, "Because if anything does happen to go wrong, he'll face a fate worse than death?"

"He wouldn't understand it anyway, and it isn't going to go wrong. If I thought that thing had any chance whatsoever of breaking free, I wouldn't be standing in the same room as it. Or on the same planet as it." he added as an afterthought.

"But you said our containment fields can't hold it!"

"Not permanently, no. But long enough to transport it to the prison."

"Do their defenses work yet?"

"The first live test happened three days ago. I've heard that it went so well, the scientist who hit the switch now can't leave. The real thing will be fully up and running well in time for the ship to arrive." the scientist stared up at the machine, "I never dreamt such a thing was possible before this project began, Robertson. A completely enclosed localised reality, bound by an infinite causal loop. The perfect containment field - it will be conceptually impossible to escape!"

"Its just a larger scale version of the pocket realities used in the Capture Chance system."

"Ah, but they were never very stable - they were only for temporary use and needed a strong dimensional anchor. Most bounty hunters still can't use them."

"Mission accomplished."

They both turned to look at the new arrival, who leant against the glass door, idly pushing it back every time it tried to close on him.

"Ah, Schumizer. Ever the reliable one around here. Which one relented, out of interest?"

Schumizer snapped his finger and a small boy walked in.

"This is Kirk Kurtliegen. Say hello to the nice doctor, Kirk."

The boy ignored him and stared up at the machinery with the same thoughtful look as any small child planning to pull something apart with no regard for whether it breaks or not.

"The youngest brother? I can't sign a tenancy agreement with a ten year old child!"

"You don't understand. The agreement's already been signed by the oldest brother. Then the father sold this kid to me for fifty thousand bucks."

"WHAT THE...? Schumizer, my orders were not to do ANYTHING ILLEGAL!"

"Sorry." Mr. Schumizer shrugged, "It was just sort of happening when I got there, you know what those Kurtliegens are like, and you know how auctions are, you have to act fast, can't let a deal go by. But hey, he could be useful, he's young enough to be conditioned easily, he'll be good for Agency training in a few years, he knows the Island backward, it'll help us deal with any problems with the family in the future to have one of them around."

"I don't care what you do with him, as long as I never see him, or any other small children, in this lab again. Which bit of 'top secret' and 'highly breakable equipment' do you not understand?"

Schumizer shrugged and pulled Kirk, who was trying to evade notice so that he can edge across the room to a particularly inviting glass tube that crackled and glowed blue, back through the door.

"Self-important prick. " he said, "Right, now that's sorted, where do you want to go next, cafeteria or cybernetics lab?"

"What was the blue thing?" asked the boy.

"You know the Capture system? That's where we store the empty units when we're not using them. They break really easily."

"Cool. What was the big thing in the middle of the room?"

"That thing?" Schumizer shuddered, "Believe me, you don't want to touch that."

* * *

Schumizer and Seagal were relieved to finally be away from the construction site.

The sweltering heat was almost unbearable, the noise of the enormous drilling machines that dug so far into the dormant volcano that they had to be shielded against pockets of magma was deafening, clouds of rock dust and volcanic ash billowed everywhere.

The scientific crew oversaw every detail of the operation, taking notes, talking in excited whispers and pointing at details Schumizer could not see but assumed were fascinating to a quantum physicist. They insisted that everything be done in painstaking detail – the cylinder must be lowered precisely into the hole, most importantly, to avoid damage. It would be suspended there by an antigravity field similar to the one Schumizer used to hover – unlike the technology the cylinder was based on, it had been easy to affect large areas with and was taking decades to miniaturise. At every step, checks were performed on the cylinder to make sure the capture field was still holding. The process was going to take all day.

"No, no, left a picometre!" screamed the scientist,'Doc' Algernon Pentaclinus, waving his arm left in a frantic motion. His concern wasn't only due to being the head of the scientific operations on the Island – he had witnessed the strength of the causal loop firsthand. It had been three days before he could step out of his office door without re-appearing again through the other door. He did not want to take any chances with the thing the field was designed to hold.

Schumizer understood their concern. He was one of the few people on the team who had seen the thing inside the cylinder and knew exactly how dangerous it was. However, guarding the facility was both boring and largely necessary. Nobody was going to attack an Agency team handling equipment too large to steal on a virtually unreachable prison island. If the thing got out, there was nothing he could do about it. Despite the enormous import of the operation and the potential danger to the entire Multiverse should anything go wrong, they were really only watching a human-sized cigar-shaped metal cylinder be lowered on a crane into a pit in the centre of a mountain.

"Hey, kid, are you bored?"

"Look, a giant drill!" replied Kirk. He was leaning over the handrail, swinging his legs, his eyes on the construction machines. Schumizer sighed. Small boys were too easy to impress. He swung over the rail so that he was facing Schumizer, upside down, "Is that thing going to drill right under the Island? It'll collapse!"

"Don't worry, the Agency are making a lot of changes all around the Island but they're not here to destroy anything."

"But they were taking down all the doors!"

"They're going to put in stronger doors. With big locks."

"There's no use locking that door. There are about ten secret passages into that room."

"You should point out all the secret passages. Do you really know where everything is on the Island?"

"I've been in every room in the castle and all three of the Towers, I've been all through the forest and up on the mountains. I've been on the cliffs and the beach, but not in the sea, there are sharks, and not the swamp 'cause you sink if you go there. And of course I know where everything in our house is."

"What about these caves?"

"They don't really go anywhere that interesting. There's a ledge under me, you know, so you don't need to worry if I fall."

"Do you know about all the traps that are here?"

"Oh, most of the traps are old and rusty, they don't work any more. We can't pay to maintain them. But most of the stairs are dangerous too, for the same reason."

"Say I had a limitless budget and I wanted to get all those traps working – in fact, I could make them better - but I had to know where they all were, how they worked, which ones worked and which ones didn't. Also, which passages led in and out of the rooms, so I can stop people going in and out as they pleased."

"There are secret rooms, too. I hide from Father, and show my brothers how to as well, and make them pay me to use the rooms. The adults hardly ever go in at all any more, though, they don't know what they're missing."

"You know what? I agree. I think this is a very important matter that needs to be resolved right now." Before I go insane from boredom and throw myself down the pit, thought Schumizer, "Seagal, coming with?"

"Huh?" the other Bounty Hunter flinched, "Sorry, I was asleep."


	3. Chapter 3

"_Brother..." _

_An endless expanse of snow and ice. A raging blizzard. He could only faintly see the outlines of the two figures in the distance, one male, one female. The male, powerfully built, stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out at the pure white sky, while the female crouched down, looking at the drop._

"_What is it, sister?"_

"_I can see it clearly... its about to begin..." _

"_Our second chance?"_

"_Our only chance."_

"_Will we live?"_

"_No, we will not. We will always be dead. But so will everything else. We will reign over the land of the dead. It will be our world. Our world of perfect evil."_

"_Is this a true vision?"_

"_It is an opportunity, not a certainty. We will have to create our world. We must make our move soon."_

"_Of course. Tell me what to do and I will do it."_

"_Summon the others. Make sure they join us in our new home. Also, contact the mystic. He must come with us, too."_

"_Brother... We are not alone..." _

_The woman turned around, looking directly at him, then her brother turned around as well. He made to run but was paralysed by an indescribable fear. He could not see their faces but could feel their malevolence, a cold, dark shadow._

"_A child. He is near death. We will consume his soul."_

"_No! Ignore him! There is another. He is one of us. We must reach him! Now! Brother, NOW!"_

_

* * *

_

"Hey, kid!"

Kirk screamed and whacked the man across the face. Had he not been wearing a mask, Schumizer would have been sporting a broken nose, some loose teeth or at the very least, a nasty bruise. As it was, he had to straighten his dislodged mask. He regarded the boy, whose eyes were terrified. He sprang into a fighting stance, his left arm covering his face. His right arm hung limply at his side. He recognised Schumizer and dropped his guard – slightly.

"What's wrong. Seen a ghost?" Schumizer looked around, "Oh... well, we do seem to be in a crypt... in that case... ew, what the hell is all over my clothes?"

Schumizer wiped down his tunic and trousers, which were covered in something damp, foul-smelling and a putrid shade of green. The floor was completely flooded with a mixture of stagnant water, moss and mould. The graves themselves were cracked, eroded and, in some places, completely collapsed. Objects that looked suspiciously like bones, rags and other human remains poked from the rubble. The stench was making him nauseous.

"DON'T STAND ON THAT!" screamed Kirk. Schumizer jumped away just as the floor tile he was about to put his weight on crumbled under his feet and a large tombstone fell from above. It would have crushed him, had he been a second slower. There was an audible click and a new tile reappeared, along with a new tombstone, as he noticed when he looked up.

"That was deliberate!" he complained.

"It keeps out grave robbers." said Kirk.

"Who would come this far out of the way to rob a bunch of badly maintained graves?"

"People who know what's in them. Uncle Klarth. Lavians. Lady."

"Lady? THE Lady? You've actually met THE..."

"We have to get out of here."

"I agree." Schumizer turned his nose up, "But my antigravitic field is out of power. The strain of lifting you and slowing both our falls was too much for it. Why'd you let go like that? We could have both died!"

"I didn't! The ring broke!"

"Don't lie! I saw you lose your grip! Is your arm okay?" Kirk was still holding it limp and was now trying to conceal the fact with all the skill and subtlety of a panicked ten year old.

"Nothing is wrong with my arm! At least it works better than your Auntie... your floaty thing!"

"Ah, so you admit it doesn't work!"

"I'm not weak! Kurtliegens are not weak!"

"Kirk!" Schumizer said, in what he hoped was a reassuring manner, "All human beings are weak. They're small and squishy, they can't fly, they need sleep all the time, they die if you shove a sword through them or drop them off a cliff or set them on fire. That's why we need things like antigravitic field."

The boy didn't laugh or even look vaguely impressed, "But some humans are weaker than others. Kurtliegens must not be weak humans. I think that father sold me because of my weakness."

"Oh, so you admit that he sold you!"

"I'm not a proper Kurtliegen. He wouldn't sell me if I was."

"Nonsense! With that kind of twisted, depraved thinking, you're JUST like..." he stopped, then put a finger to his lips, "What was that sound?"

Kirk looked even more terrified, "Its found us!"

"What's found us!"

"Er... remember when you made the bad joke about ghosts?"


End file.
